Justin Trudeau’s stardust threatens Jack Layton’s Toronto bastion.

Thomas Mulcair’s NDP is trying its best to be considered sensible as it searches for the centre ground upon which elections are said to be won. It’s not clear that this is enough, writes Thomas Walkom.

True, the party didn’t do as well in other provinces. When wins and losses were netted, it had gained only one seat west of Ontario and two east of Quebec.

But the NDP made significant progress in the Toronto area, where it added six more seats to those it already held.

That was 2011.

Three years later, the NDP’s Toronto stronghold is under attack.

In a federal byelection Tuesday, it lost Trinity-Spadina, the iconic downtown riding that had been held by Layton’s widow, Olivia Chow, until she resigned earlier this year to run for mayor.

In the Scarborough-Agincourt byelection the same day, the New Democrats came in a distant third, with only 8.5 per cent of the votes cast.

That’s down from the 18 per cent vote share the NDP won in this east-end riding in 2011.

On their own, byelections are notoriously poor predictors. But Tuesday’s contest came hard on the heels of a provincial general election that saw the NDP lose three Toronto seats to Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals.

Federal and provincial ridings follow near-identical boundaries in Ontario. So at one level, the NDP loss in Trinity-Spadina is no surprise.

It went provincially to the Liberals on June 12 and federally to the Liberals just under three weeks later.

That is not likely to provide much cheer to New Democrat MPs Andrew Cash (Davenport) and Matthew Kellway (Beaches-East York), both of whom saw their provincial counterparts go down to defeat last month.

There is no single explanation for the NDP’s troubles in Toronto.

Provincially, the party’s decision to veer right cost it Toronto voters. Two of the defeated MPPs have acknowledged that.

In absolute terms, those losses were more than made up for by new voters that the party attracted outside of Toronto (the NDP vote share rose marginally across the province).

In terms of seats, it was a draw. Andrea Horwath’s Ontario NDP picked up enough seats in Oshawa, Sudbury and Windsor to offset those lost in Toronto.

Nonetheless, the party’s Toronto base was unnerved. And that, it seems, bled into Tuesday’s federal byelection.

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